A man dressed as Batman villain the Joker has been shot dead by police in America after pointing a loaded shotgun at them.

The dead man, who was said to be obsessed with the character, was wearing full costume and makeup when he was challenged by officers in a national park in Virginia, according to legal documents.

The FBI named him as army specialist Christopher Lanum, who was wanted as a suspect over the stabbing of a fellow soldier at Fort Eustis, a major army base in the state, several hours before. Lanum's girlfriend, Patsy Ann Marie Montowski, who was with him when he was shot, told investigators that the soldier idolised the Joker, played in the most recent Batman film, The Dark Knight, by the late Heath Ledger.

The events began at the base early on Sunday when Lanum become embroiled in an argument with a fellow soldier, Mitchell Stone, allegedly stabbing him and using a stun gun on him.

Lanum and Montowski fled in her van, which was later spotted around 200 miles away inside Shenandoah national park. Police pursued the pair, who crashed the van after running over a spiked strip laid in the road.

According to the FBI documents, Lanum told Montowski to kill him with the shotgun but she refused. He then pointed the gun at police, his finger on the trigger, and refused orders to drop it, before being shot several times.

Montowski was also shot and taken to hospital. Details of the case emerged yesterday after she was charged in connection with the case following treatment.

"If you are marching with white nationalists, you are by definition not a very nice person. If Malala Yousafzai had taken part in that rally, you'd have to say 'Okay, I guess Malala sucks now.'" ~ John Oliver

Even if they don't find an actor to portray The Joker, or somehow concede to this petition, they would just refer to him as being held solitary in the asylum just to keep some continuity. You don't have to base a whole other film one the same villain. It's nothing really to be worried about if you look at The Dark Knight as an example. They only used Scarecrow for two or three minutes and that was to set up Batman's posers. I doubt they will reuse the Joker and even more so Harley Quinn.

How do writers of the next installment reconcile the fact that the Joker is very much alive at the end of The Dark Knight? Is Harley Quinn the answer?

Ledger fans demand The Joker retires from film By Mairi MackayCNN

LONDON, England (CNN) -- A group of Heath Ledger fans have taken their reverence for the late "The Dark Knight" star to a whole new level.

Heath Ledger fans at Web site, The Ultimate Joker, launched a petition calling for studios to remove The Joker from future Batman movies.

Followers of the actor, who electrified audiences with his chilling reinvention of The Joker in the second Batman blockbuster, are calling for the character to be retired from the movies permanently.

Ledger supporters at new Web site, The Ultimate Joker, launched a petition last week calling for studios to remove The Joker from any future Batman movies. The petition currently has 2431 supporters.

"We think Heath deserves this honor," the site's team leader, Fer Barbella told CNN over the phone from Buenos Aires. "He is the ultimate Joker."

"We are Batman fans from the comics and from the movies," he said, "After we saw "The Dark Knight" we thought this Joker was really the best. It deserves to be withdrawn from any Batman sequels.

"When Michael Jordan retired they withdrew the number 23 jersey as an honor. It's the same thing with Heath."

Barbella told CNN he believes any new performance just won't be able to top Ledger's.

"He upgraded the character in a thrilling way," he said. "Although a lot of actors would love the chance to play the Joker, as Batman fans and now Heath Ledger fans, we think no-one could ever perform it as well as he did."

The Web site is the brainchild of Barbella, 34, Nico Pimentel, 33 and Natalia Rodoni, 33, all advertising creatives in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

The trio say that if they collect enough names they may go to the studio direct to present their petition.

"As soon as we start seeing that we have more than 50,000 names on our Web site, perhaps we will go to the Warner Brothers gate and do a bit of activism," Pimentel said.

The huge buzz around Ledger's performance as The Joker last year stemmed from his update of the iconic character previously played by camp comedian Cesar Romero, and as a hateful clown by Jack Nicholson.

Ledger's Joker was a very different proposition from those that had come before: in a ripped, stained suit; clown makeup smeared across a scarred, twisted mouth; his Joker was a nihilistic, sociopathic prankster. "Why so serious?" he sneered in a performance that received rave reviews from critics globally.

Do you agree that Heath Ledger's Joker should be the last one ever?

The actor was found dead, after overdosing on prescription drugs, at his apartment in New York on 22 January 2008, shortly after concluding work on "The Dark Knight."

Ledger has been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of The Joker, having already been awarded a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor and a BAFTA for Best Supporting Actor.

Barbella says that the Web site and petition is their award: "The Academy gives an Oscar," he said. "This is a new award from the people. A user-generated award."

"The mantle of spinsterhood was definitely in her shoulders. She was twenty five and looked it."

I have a friend who is a composer who says that the score should be ruled ineligible because it was edited so much in post into something else, more of a remix than a score. Having just seen the film, I see his point...but the score to the film is so integral to its pacing that I'm pleased to see it eligible.

"If you are marching with white nationalists, you are by definition not a very nice person. If Malala Yousafzai had taken part in that rally, you'd have to say 'Okay, I guess Malala sucks now.'" ~ John Oliver

Sabin wrote:The most crippling aspect of 'The Dark Knight' is Bale's Batman. The voice is still as terrible as it's always been. He's a pretty decent Bruce Wayne but his Batman just looks and sounds silly.

Whatever, I'd still bang him.

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"The mantle of spinsterhood was definitely in her shoulders. She was twenty five and looked it."

I just received a screener for 'The Dark Knight' and while I have enough grievous reservations to say that this film will either place near the bottom of my year end list or not at all, it certainly deserves a Best Picture nomination. The audacity of 'The Dark Knight' and the depth of Joker's so-called "social experiment" is almost exhausting. Deride me as a fanboy but there isn't a comic book figure with a mythos revered in quite the way as Batman, and that 'The Dark Knight' feels like a definitive distillation is some cause for celebration if only among certain factions. Hard-pressed to explain the linear sequence of events in the film, I'd probably just start whistling. Because it's Christopher Nolan - hardly the most visual filmmaker on the planet - it's akin to an astonishing read, and all throughout 'The Dark Knight' even on a second viewing I wanted to be able to turn back a page. How anything in this film was plotted out in advance is unbelievable but it's sold remarkably well, and Nolan keeps it moving along very well with thematic parallels and shrewdly punny dialogue.

Except for 'Memento' which I will vouch for any day of the week, Christopher Nolan makes parenthetical films in quotation marks. They aren't as much as are about. He has classical sensibilities except for the art of pause. 'The Dark Knight' could take place in real time for all I know. It doesn't stop once it starts. I don't want to see a lot of movies like this one but like 'Synecdoche, New York', I'm willing to make concessions if earned and 'The Dark Knight' earns it. What feels unearned is the rushed third act in which Joker's social experiment expands a little past the breaking point. This is unfortunate because only here does the film's belief in the good of people come through, but after so many nihilist set pieces it's almost inconsequential.

The most crippling aspect of 'The Dark Knight' is Bale's Batman. The voice is still as terrible as it's always been. He's a pretty decent Bruce Wayne but his Batman just looks and sounds silly.

"If you are marching with white nationalists, you are by definition not a very nice person. If Malala Yousafzai had taken part in that rally, you'd have to say 'Okay, I guess Malala sucks now.'" ~ John Oliver

"In times past, a composer may have received credit for creating the musical soundtrack for a movie even when he contributed little more than the theme. However, an uproar has now followed the decision of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science's decision to disqualify the score of The Dark Knight because credited composers James Newton Howard and Hans Zimmer were unable to establish that they were directly responsible for more than 70 percent of the music, a requirement of Academy rules. The two had listed three others as composers on the official cue sheet, telling Daily Variety earlier this week that they did so in order to qualify them for royalties. The Academy's music committee reportedly spent hours debating the issue, with several members arguing unsuccessfully that the score merited nomination notwithstanding the cue-sheet issue."

"When it comes to the subject of torture, I trust a woman who was married to James Cameron for three years."-- Amy Poehler in praise of Zero Dark Thirty director Kathryn Bigelow

The problem with 'Hellboy 2' is that it's a Halloween movie, not a summer movie. It has no business opening in summer. This summer was incredibly crowded with no space to breathe in May. It stole some of 'Hancock's thunder b/c of the rather steep drop off but then it was immediately over when 'The Dark Knight' premiered. I think the studios knew they were in trouble. 'Hellboy 2' is almost impossible to summate into a logline. It's a long, low concept, sprawling movie where plot is beside the point. It's also pretty fun. They should've just made Hellboy a Halloween mainstay.

"If you are marching with white nationalists, you are by definition not a very nice person. If Malala Yousafzai had taken part in that rally, you'd have to say 'Okay, I guess Malala sucks now.'" ~ John Oliver

Guillermo del Toro (who, btw, has yet to direct a major box-office hit)

Still he does have two major hits, unless we now only count $100 million+ as being a major hit. By that standard, you'd be correct.

That is exactly what I meant, especially when you consider how much box-office potential superhero/comic book adaptations have today. Perhaps they're not gigantic commercial flops like Waterworld or Kingdom of Heaven, but they're not exactly major hits. And they're certainly not major hits like the Lord of the Rings films, which was really what I was getting at (however, they are bigger than anything Peter Jackson did before the LOTR movies).

And, by the way, Hellboy II was, in fact, a box-office disappointment. It was supposed to be to the first Hellboy what The Spy Who Shagged Me was to the first Austin Powers movie, and for some reason the geniuses over at Universal decided to release it the weekend before The Dark Knight and probably cost it about $30-40 million at the box-office. One would think that somebody got fired for that fiasco.

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"Young men make wars and the virtues of war are the virtues of young men: courage and hope for the future. Then old men make the peace, and the vices of peace are the vices of old men: mistrust and caution." -- Alec Guinness (Lawrence of Arabia)